Popeye takes London by Storm

Jeff Koons: Popeye Series

2 July
13 September 2009

Popeye takes London by Storm: Jeff
Koons' Popeye Series opens at the Serpentine Gallery in London the day after
Chrisitie's Postwar & Contemporary sale sees one of the three 'Moustache' pieces in the series sell for
1,105,250 or $1,842,452. It was
a fantastic opening in Hyde Park with splendid summer weather and a star studded crowd to stop the press.

From
July 2nd through September 13th, the Serpentine Gallery presents an exhibition
of the work of the celebrated American artist Jeff Koons, his first major
exhibition in a public gallery in England.

Working
in thematic series since the early 1980s, Koons has explored notions of
consumerism, taste, banality, childhood and sexuality. He is known for his
meticulously fabricated works that draw on a variety of objects and images from
American and consumer culture.

For
his exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, Koons presents paintings and sculptures from his
Popeye series, which he began in 2002.

The
works incorporate some of Koons
s signature ideas and motifs, including surreal
combinations of everyday objects, cartoon imagery, art-historical references
and children
s toys.

The
sculptures on show continue Koons
s interest in casting inflatable toys. Those
typically used by children in a swimming pool are cast in aluminium, their
surfaces painted to bear an uncanny resemblance to the original objects. He
juxtaposes these replica readymades with unaltered everyday objects, such as
chairs or rubbish bins. The paintings are complex and layered compositions that
combine disparate images both found and created by Koons, including images of
the sculptures in the series.

Featuring
loans from both public and private collections, the exhibition also includes
works that have never been shown publicly before. The immediately recognisable
figures of Popeye and Olive Oyl are central in the series and appear in several
prominent works within the exhibition. One of the most iconic American
comicstrip characters, Popeye was conceived 80 years ago this year in 1929 when
the Great Depression was taking hold. In Popeye
s early years, the cartoon
addressed the hardships and injustices of the time and, in this current period
of economic recession, he is a fitting character to rediscover and explore.

Koons
has used inflatables in his work since the late 1970s; one of his most iconic
sculptures, Rabbit, 1986, is an inflatable bunny rendered in reflective
stainless steel. He has also made sculptures on a spectacular scale inspired by
inflatables, including works from his monumental Celebration series.

Jeff
Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania, in 1955. His work has been widely
exhibited internationally and his most recent solo exhibitions include
presentations at the Ch
teau de Versailles, France; Neue Nationalgalerie,
Berlin; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York, all in 2008. Koons lives and works in New York.

Moustache forms part of Jeff Koons' Popeye series, which is the subject of his first major public exhibition in the United Kingdom,
being held at the Serpentine Gallery, London from 2 July this year. In this
work, the monochrome metal form of the moustache hangs like some medieval
contraption from its red chains. Perched absurdly on the twists at the ends of
this vast comedy Victorian moustache are two swimming-pool toys, hanging facing
downwards, their maniacal grins intact.

Moustache introduces a complex
visual game of contrasts that is accentuated by the presence of the
inflatables. The wrought-iron look of the moustache itself, suspended from the
industrial chains, give a great sense of weight, of Damocles-like suspense as
well as suspension. This introduces an intriguing visual contrast with the
inflatables so perkily perching on its ends, a contrast that is disrupted
entirely by the fact that they are in fact cast aluminium sculptures,
painstakingly painted to appear identical to their original sources. This
perfectionist craftsmanship means that the life-sized inflatables enact a
fantastic deception, creating the impression of lightness and flexibility while
actually being made of heavy metal, recalling the bronze Aqualung and Lifeboat
of his 1985 series, Equilibrium. The visual game that Koons has created
with this sleight-of-hand is only accentuated by the contrast in terms of scale
between the life-sized models of blow-up toys and the insanely gigantic
moustache itself. In terms of weight, scale and even content, Koons is playing
with our sense of proportion.

The moustache as an iconographic element in
Koons' work first appeared in a painting in hisEasyfun-Ethereal series
entitled Sandwiches, executed in 2000. This facial fur, which recalls
the strongmen in circuses of old, has since become a central motif in many of
his two- and three-dimensional collage works, invoking a range of sources and
inspirations. In it can be perceived one of the earliest and most irreverent
acts of appropriation, Marcel Duchamp's moustachioedMona Lisa from his
1919 work L.H.O.O.Q. Likewise, it recalls the Surrealist artist Salvador
Dal
, whose example both as an artist reaching a wide audience and as an
accessible persona within the art world provided such guidance to Koons, who as
a teenager had made a pilgrimage to visit him at New York's St. Regis Hotel in
1974. It also refers to the work of one of the great protagonists of so-called
'Outsider Art' in Chicago, H.C. Westermann, whose own semi-autobiographical
prints of the Dance of Death featured a sailor sporting a rather rakish
moustache.

The Popeye series to which Moustache belongs
consists of two strands of collage: paintings, in which his own works and
images from found photos, pornography and magazines are reconfigured to playful
new effect, and a group of sculptures in which swimming-pool inflatable toys
are juxtaposed with metal objects. In Moustache and the other inflatables,
Koons has reinvoked the piratical appropriation which lay at the source of so
many of his early works. ' I've returned to the readymade,' he stated. 'I've
returned to really enjoying thinking about Duchamp. This whole world seems to
have opened itself up again to me, the dialogue of art' (Koons, quoted in H.
Werner Holzwarth (ed.), Jeff Koons, Cologne, 2009, p. 504). For this
series, Koons made a practice of trawling through shops and websites, searching
for inflatable toys that somehow embodied the almost Platonic perfection and
recognisability that gives his work its intense visual impact, that allows it
to speak to everyman. However, as is so often the case with Koons' works,
appearances can be hugely deceptive: these ersatz inflatables, made of painted
aluminium, are only based on found objects.

For Koons, whose works
always combine humour with the philosophical, the containment of air that is
invoked by these inflatables has long been a key motif. After all, it is the
very stuff of life, without which we cannot survive, and is integral to his
early inflatables, to the vacuum-cleaners displayed in vitrines, to the Equilibrium
works and the Celebration sculpturs alike. In an interview last year
with Amy Cappellazzo, he explained that, 'I still enjoy working with
inflatables, because I see them as life-saving devices, and you know, a lot of
times if you look at pool toys it'll say it's not a life-saving device, but I
think it's really just the opposite.' These objects, hanging so strangely on
the metal-frame moustache, are designed to float, to support people, and at the
same time they contain breath. The notion of buoyancy itself has long been
crucial to Koons, and rooted in his own experiences, as he recounted in the
same interview:

'When I was about three and four, I'd go swimming with my
father, and at one point I got this little Styrofoam tank that gave me some
buoyancy, then I would put this on my back, and it gave me a sense of
independence. And I really think that as a person I started to kind of go off
in the world more from that experience. And that buoyancy kind of has changed
in different ways, and it's gone into inflatables and different devices with
air. I think comes from some of those first times swimming in the ocean.'

Throughout
his career, Koons' works have often been celebrations of life and, by
extension, of procreation. He has long sought to remove any sense of stigma or
shame relating to sex, which after all is an integral part of the survival of
humanity. The inflatables themselves often have a strange sexual tension to
them, acting as wombs, as containers. In the case of the two toy animals in Moustache,
this oblique sexuality is invoked by the steel frame penetrating their
inflatable rings. Throughout the Popeye series, in both its sculptures
and its paintings, Koons has deliberately collided cutesy imagery relating to
childhood and toys with a liberal dose of raw sexuality, perhaps equating the
two and suggesting that sex is a form of game for grown-ups. As Arthur C. Danto
pointed out, the sexual content is even heightened in Moustache by its
resemblance to a pair of spread legs. The chains suspending Moustache
and its sinister, dark frame may prompt associations with bondage; the
angularity of the moustache itself appears to threaten the toys, which in
reality would be deflated by the simplest puncture, introducing themes of
fragility and damage that introduce both a sense of the sado-masochistic,
accentuated by the torture-device look of the work as a whole and also of the
ephemeral nature of life itself. After all, we as humans are also forms of
inflatable-made-flesh, easily punctured, precariously balanced as we stumble
through life. In this way, Koons has managed, through this three-dimensional
juxtaposition of moustache, chains and toys, to create a work that explores a
vast range of issues relating to the human condition, yet which remains as
engaging as the grins on the inflatables' faces.